We have a support group within our organization that periodically performs emergency changes to replace faulty disk drives in our storage arrays. They do these 3-4 times a week and is adversely impacting our metrics of keeping the emergency volume to a minimum.

We, the Change Management team consider these as valid emergency changes but the support group consider these as routine and reactionary changes that when performed, pose no risk. The risk comes if they are not performed in a timely manner, data might get lost and we lose the redundancy. The support team wants us to re-categorize their routine emergency change as a normal change so our metrics are not impacted by their Emergency changes.

What do you guys think would be a viable solution? I have several ideas roaming around but based on our definition of an Emergency changes, which is basically the standard ITIL definition, their reactionary changes would still be Emergencies. They just don't want to get penalized for having such high number of E-CRQs.

By the way, re-aligning our emergency metric is not an option.
Thank you.

second, the fact that the fault leads to an emergency h/w fix is a fault restoration and if the work has to be done quickly and your CM policy has such h/w work as changes, then the work is an emergency

Third, the ticket classification is correct

foruth the issue is not the classification forCM but the fact that the storage environment is poor.

Cease worrying about the statitistics

Worry more about the shitty storage environment.... and escalate this to your management_________________John Hardesty
ITSM Manager's Certificate (Red Badge)

We only allow Emergency changes to be performed in the event of a P1 or P2 incident and this has been incorporated into Servicenow. If they do not have one, then the request is logged under a Normal unplanned changed and assessed by change management.

I guess also that the resolution could be resolved under incident, if an incident has been raised?

I would suggest that there is no such thing as a Routine Emergency Change. It may be a regular high priority change that needs to be implemented, however, I would categorise Emergency Changes as those that are unexpected, usually of high priority.